The Embrace of Unreason

by Frederick Brown

  Alexandre Stavisky

  The frog burst in 1933, when an insurance company sought to redeem its fake bonds. The crédit municipal temporized as Stavisky, having made no provision for the inevitable, frantically rallied cronies to raise funds with a new bond issue. Things did not go his way. Rumors of malfeasance were spread by journalists who delved deeper than government overseers. While the latter continued to shuffle paper from ministry to ministry, a serious investigation was set in motion. The treasury receiver in Bayonne scrutinized the crédit municipal’s books on orders from the state comptroller, and revealed a breathtaking discrepancy between its private records and its public fiction. It had nothing very valuable in pawn, least of all the Spanish crown jewels. Police officers arrested a key executive of the bogus enterprise, one Gustave Tissier. It was December. Everything then began to unravel.

  Beneficiaries of pension funds heavily invested in the crédit municipal (with the Ministry of Labor’s approval) derived some satisfaction from seeing Stavisky exposed. They would learn long after the fact that the normally suave con artist had lost his composure upon hearing of Tissier’s arrest and had fled south to the French Alps. The hunt soon began for the man known in many quarters as M. Alexandre. Reporters caught wind of it and finally bruited his surname. On January 1, 1934, Paris-Soir ran an article entitled “Search Continues for Swindler Stavisky.” Several days later, the criminal investigation department—Sûreté Générale—received a credible tip. Inspector Marcel Charpentier boarded a train for Lyon and on January 8 met with the owner of a chalet perched on a snowy slope of Mont Blanc in Chamonix. Police entered, knocked on the door of a back room, identified themselves, heard a shot, and found Stavisky mortally wounded. Officialdom ruled it a suicide, leaving half the country convinced that people in high places against whom Stavisky could have testified were assassins.

  Blame for the impunity with which Alexandre Stavisky had conducted his criminal operations fell on many heads as the prosecutor’s office interrogated a host of witting and unwitting accomplices in government, in the Sûreté Générale, in the judiciary, in the press. Camille Chautemps, France’s most recent prime minister, a Radical whose party had much to answer for, promised that neither fear nor favor would sway the hand of justice. The skillful orator acknowledged the lapses of justice (the nineteen adjournments of Stavisky’s trial) and of the police, wrote a sardonic commentator in Le Figaro: “And this rapturous beating of mea culpas on other people’s breasts was punctuated by an oath to exact punishment, once the inquests are complete, without regard for bonds of friendship, affection, or family.… The Left seemed to consider this promise a gesture worthy of Brutus.” One of the first casualties was the minister of colonies, Albert Dalimier, who, as minister of justice in 1932, had declared Bayonne’s crédit municipal a legitimate candidate for the investment of insurance funds. Dalimier resigned when his letter of authorization was leaked to the press. Leaks led to resignations, detainments, and suicides. Thirteen months after the inquest began, the investigating magistrate gave the public prosecutor two volumes containing seven thousand pages of experts’ reports. By then Chautemps had long since fallen from power. Nineteen of Stavisky’s associates, as well as his wife, Arlette, were indicted for crimes and misdemeanors.

  Stavisky’s widow, Arlette, formerly a Chanel model, being tried in 1936 on a charge of colluding in her husband’s swindles. She was acquitted.

  News other than the Stavisky Affair was forced into cramped quarters. Many daily papers regularly reserved half of the front page for analyses of the nefarious scheme, photographs of the actors, and commentaries suggesting that it would not suffice to chase moneylenders from the temple: the temple itself had to be demolished. Like Dreyfus’s treason, Stavisky’s machinations told against the Republic. In an article about the Dutch Communist beheaded by the Nazis for burning down the Reichstag, Philippe Barrès, Maurice’s son, wrote that a dynamic team was needed in France, as existed in Germany, to purge the homeland and make it stand tall in the eyes of the world.11 “While we blame the harshness of the National regime, it is high time that we react to some of the same disorders that afflict the Reich.… We must proceed to investigate the Stavisky scandal exhaustively.” The Far Left and the Far Right chanted antiphonies of denunciation. Could anyone doubt any longer the turpitude of the ruling class? asked L’Humanité. It was pervasive. “Every day a new name, a new agency of government, a sacred principle of bourgeois democracy is sucked into the whirlwind. Magistrates shielding a swindler. Deputies serving him. High functionaries sharing his booty. A police force of gangsters admitting him into their midst, then shooting him. A minister handing pension funds over to him.… Liberal? Conservative? Your alternate displays of morality are nothing but the dustups of rival gangs.” Léon Daudet, home from Belgium, hectored the “government of Scum” day after day, surpassing himself in invective. Charles Maurras took the broader view: “Besides the Jewish State, the Masonic State, the immigrant State, the Protestant State, there are several thousand profiteering clans whose titles derive from their yeomen work in dismantling the French State after 1793.” The battle between parliamentary conservatives and liberals over Stavisky was, he declared, nothing but a preliminary skirmish in the war between the “legal State” constituted by usurpers and the “real State” of true Frenchmen taking up arms against a “judiciary of bandits, a police force of assassins, a government of traitors.”

  To militant anti-republicans, and particularly to L’Action Française, the Stavisky Affair was revivifying. Its leaders lived for havoc even as they called for the restitution of true social order, and on January 10, a day after several hundred demonstrators, mostly Camelots du Roi and their cousins in the Jeunesses Patriotes, had been repulsed by the Republican Guard near Parliament, they rallied the faithful to gather in greater numbers. “Parisians! This evening, upon leaving your offices and ateliers, when cabinet ministers addressing venal deputies try to hoodwink the French, come shout your scorn for their lies.” More than five thousand people heeded the call. In the tradition of Parisian firebrands, they halted traffic near the Palais Bourbon with cast-iron grates, overturned lampposts, and tree branches. Deputies inside Parliament heard shouts of “Down with the sellouts!” coming from the streets. After six hours of confusion, paddy wagons were filled to overflowing. Thirty policemen suffered injuries.

  The government suspended performances of Coriolanus at the Comédie Française, fearing that Shakespeare’s play about a patrician hero pitted against Rome’s plebeian tribunate might incite further violence. To no avail. Things went from bad to worse. In his paper La Victoire, Gustave Hervé, a right-wing extremist, who was beating the drums for Pétain, declared, “Anything but this filthy anarchy! How many people must be mumbling between their teeth these days: ‘Ah! Vive Mussolini et vive Hitler!’ ”

  Ginned up by the right-wing press, bolstered by paramilitary leagues, and confident that the prefect of police, Jean Chiappe, would refrain from turning water cannons on Camelots du Roi as he did on Communists, L’Action Française grew bolder. No longer content to win minor victories in peripheral neighborhoods, it concerted with the Union Nationale des Combattants and the Jeunesses Patriotes to launch a demonstration from the Place de l’Opéra on January 27. Thousands gathered there in the early evening and swarmed down lamplit streets and avenues leading to the Place de la Concorde, where, within sight of the National Assembly across the Seine, large police vans blocked their advance. The rally became a riot. It lasted until midnight. By that time Chautemps had resigned from office, citing the riots as one reason for his resignation. There were violent clashes at barricades. Police had taken the precaution of having tree grates removed, but the rioters set fires, cut fire hoses, overturned kiosks and benches, ripped up gas lines, smashed shopwindows. Three hundred people were arrested, all of whom soon walked free. Later, a commission of inquiry concluded that “these systematic depredations, the street turmoil, the paralysis of traffic cost the authorit
ies their prestige and exposed the pusillanimity of justice. It paved the way to February 6.” Among those wounded on January 27, no one died. Blood would flow ten days later.

  High on the agenda of the new premier, Édouard Daladier, was the reform of a police department responsible for allowing Stavisky to operate without let or hindrance, and particularly the removal of Jean Chiappe, who, after years at the prefecture, considered it his fiefdom. Daladier offered the dapper, well-connected, right-wing Corsican a prestigious sop—the governorship of Morocco—lest his eviction appear to have been dictated by Socialists in the coalition, or by hints of involvement in the Stavisky scandal (an investigative report having indicated that the Prefecture of Police had been for some time well aware of Stavisky’s mischief and done nothing about it). News of the ministerial shuffle and of Chiappe’s rage were a spark to tinder. The paramilitary leagues, loosely confederated, set in motion plans for a monster demonstration. On February 4, they distributed a tract declaring that the country was in danger; that all signs pointed to a “formidable purge in the army, the judiciary, every level of administration”; that the people had to impose their will. Was it not true that the government had equipped the Palais Bourbon with machine guns? (It hadn’t.) In the February 4 issue of L’Action Française, Charles Maurras wrote:

  The thieves have one enemy and even two: Paris and France. The sustained, repeated demonstrations in Paris … testify that our race, sound and upright, will not suffer the crimes of highway robbers, however highly placed, to go unpunished. The cabinet deploys against France like a battalion of Germans. They have taken the police chief hostage.

  In an article he had written for the London Evening Standard, Léon Daudet declared that the day was fast approaching when the Republic and parliamentarianism could no longer pillage France. His colleague Maurice Pujo called upon Parisians, when summoned, to “shake the Masonic yoke” and topple “this abject regime.”12

  The editors of L’Action Française issued that summons two days later, on February 6, 1934, the day of Premier Daladier’s scheduled appearance before Parliament. Another such summons came from Solidarité Française, whose secretary-general warned compatriots that they were being herded to the “fair,” like animals branded for sale or slaughter, by politicians “sporting names as un-French as Léon Blum.”

  He urged that members should demonstrate that evening against “this travesty of a regime.” They were to gather on the boulevards between Richelieu-Drouot and the Opéra, and to march “at precisely 7:15.”

  At the Sorbonne, flyers announced a political epiphany: “The long awaited hour has arrived! The hour of the national Revolution! Everybody, show up on the Boulevard Saint-Michel at 6 o’clock.” Not to be left behind by events but wary of violence, the Croix de Feu mustered some of its men on the Right Bank at a prudent distance from the Place de la Concorde, where Camelots du Roi and others would challenge police assigned to defend that approach to Parliament, across the river. Eventually many broke ranks and joined a mob flooding the Place de la Concorde from the Rue Royale and other tributaries.

  By six-thirty, after sunset, the battle was joined. Buses were burning on the great square, near the obelisk and the American embassy. Fires had been set elsewhere. Several hundred gendarmes, mounted gardes républicaines, and detachments of riot police called up from the provinces earlier that day faced a mob of thirty thousand, some armed with guns and razor-tipped sticks to hobble the horses, but many more with weapons of opportunity: chunks of asphalt, stones, hoops torn from the Tuileries Garden, the tree grates removed ten days earlier but since restored.

  Rioters and police charged and retreated by turns, while parliamentarians hurled brickbats at one another in the Palais Bourbon (which was being immediately threatened by Camelots du Roi and three thousand members of the Croix de Feu who had begun their rally on the Left Bank in the Faubourg Saint-Germain). Daladier attempted to conduct parliamentary business, citing such critical issues as the industrial and agricultural slump, high unemployment, threatened savings accounts, and national security in a Europe overshadowed by belligerent dictators. “Scandals pass, problems remain,” he noted. “We shall defend the regime. Republicans must unite if they want to ensure the survival of one of the very few free political arenas left in the world.” Likewise, Léon Blum, the leader of the Socialists, exhorted the opposition to repudiate the campaign discrediting institutions and to appreciate the danger of prolonged debate. Neither Daladier nor Blum could make himself heard above the commotion. Taunts came from Right and Left. A member of Daladier’s own Radical Party rose to criticize him for his “insolent refusal” to address the Stavisky Affair, saying, “He invokes preoccupations that weigh heavily on all of us and the need for public order, but he is the first to threaten public order. The premier willingly speaks of Fascism, but the day the executive power forbids the sovereign Assembly to deliberate is the birthday of Fascism.” Maurice Thorez, leader of the French Communist Party, denounced Daladier as a “Jacobin dictator.” It was the responsibility of proletarians, he said, “to chase Fascist bands from the streets” and to take arms against men who defended a “financial republic” corrupted by venal charlatans. Debate, such as it was, stopped when the Communist delegation began to sing “The Internationale,” prompting other deputies to answer with “La Marseillaise.” By then, reports of gunfire on the Place de la Concorde and of people fatally wounded had reached the Assembly.

  Guests observing the insurrection from the balcony of the palatial Crillon Hotel saw gendarmes beset at a dozen different points by demonstrators hurling torches and spreading lumps of coal over the cobblestones wherever mounted police threatened to charge. Next to the Crillon, flames shot out of the Naval Ministry. Across the square, a fusillade was heard on the riverside approach to the key bridge, the Pont de la Concorde. While reinforcements cleared the Tuileries Garden, bordering the east end, a large column of veterans—five or six thousand men singing “La Marseillaise”—entered from the west, via the Champs-Élysées.13 Prominent as well were members of the Union Nationale des Combattants, veterans easily recognized by their battle ribbons and Basque berets. Repeated attempts were made to breach the police line at the Pont de la Concorde, but the line held. There were lesser riots elsewhere in Paris that evening. All told, fourteen civilians and one gendarme had been killed, more than fourteen hundred wounded. The toll increased during Communist rioting the next day, and for days thereafter.

  L’Action Française and les Jeunesses Patriotes mourned their dead. The consecrated ground in which Colonel Hubert Henry had lain buried since the Dreyfus Affair became the graveyard of new martyrs. But the temper of the times and of the movements made it difficult to distinguish lamentation from vituperation, especially when, on February 7, the minister of the interior issued orders for the preventive arrest of Maurras and Daudet. “The accursed Chamber of 1932, the Chamber of the Cartel, … is doomed, and it were best that it remove itself of its own accord,” wrote Daudet in response. “Moreover, parliamentary government, which was moribund even before this drama, cannot recover from the carnage that could easily have been avoided by administering justice instead of sheltering Stavisky’s accomplices.… The indictment of Maurras and the seizure of L’Action Française in newspaper kiosks are the twitches of imbeciles at their wits’ end.” Maurras assured the aggrieved families of the dead that “all men and women worthy of the name French” shared the conviction that “the murderous pistols and rifles of democracy” were aimed at a valorous avant-garde. The assassins’ bullets were propelled by envy and by the hatred of idle, gluttonous profiteers for workers, savants, artists, “people who actually produce something.”